feature-request status-review
Allow lowercase letters in table headers
It seems that table headers will always appear with uppercase letters, even if the Markdown has them as lowercase letters. This seems to be part of the styling for table headers: there's a text-transform: uppercase there.
I understand that stylistically, uppercase headers look better, and it serves to better signify that it's a header instead of just a normal cell. However, please provide an option to disable capitalization in table headers, for three main reasons:
Capitalization may be important to define and differentiate the header
In some cases, the casing of what's in the table actually matters to the content of the post. Example below:
| User group |
Preference of style "HoTMaiL" |
Preference of style "Hotmail" |
| Former users |
72% |
23% |
| New users |
19% |
63% |
If you click to edit the post, you'll see that the second heading actually has the text "HoTMaiL", while the third one says "Hotmail". However, they look exactly the same in the table headers. (For context, the first style was used by the site's initial founders to indicate that the site offered the first HTML-based email client - the letters "HTML" were capitalized.)
Violates rules of style in some handbooks, which require lowercase lettering in some specific cases even when using all caps
This also may violate rules of style in certain style handbooks, which state that some letters should be lowercase even if using all caps otherwise. As an example, in at least one style book, the names "McDonald" and "LaSalle" should be written as McDONALD or LaSALLE in all caps. But this styling doesn't allow for that. Example:
| Prefers McDonald's |
Prefers Burger King |
| 72% |
23% |
| 19% |
63% |
Some characters' uppercase forms may be vastly different from their lowercase forms
Finally, the all-uppercase styling can introduce quirks with characters that display differently in uppercase than in lowercase. For example, the long S character ſ's uppercase form is "S", and so tables that have that character will confusingly show the letter "S" instead of the long S character ſ. Example below:
| Years |
Incidence of ſ in books |
| 1700-1800 |
64% |
It's also impossible to type the German eszett symbol ß into a header, as that breaks apart into "SS":
| Characters that break in table headers |
ß |
| As pointed out by iBug in a comment: actual character in header: |
ß |
While these instances can be worked around with code formatting, as after this answer was completed, code in table headers is no longer uppercased, the general etiquette on sites is to only use code formatting on things that are actually code, and this will go against that.
Can there please be some way to write lowercase letters in table headers, even if the preferred style is to have them all caps?
